A Senate committee in Maryland today rejected a bill to abolish the death penalty.

Efforts to repeal the death penalty in Maryland were dealt an apparently fatal blow Thursday when a key state Senate committee defeated the measure, leaving a court-ordered moratorium on state executions in place and some legislators weighing a study of the issue.

Weeks of behind-the-scenes wrangling and lobbying by religious and law enforcement officials culminated Thursday with the bill's defeat in the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee on a tie vote.

Why it failed:

Sen. Alex X. Mooney, the Frederick Repub lican and devout Catholic who was expected to swing the Senate vote, did not support the repeal after trying unsuccessfully to exempt prisoners who kill again while serving a jail term. He told the committee that he struggled with the choice.

U.S. District Court Judge Frederic Block (E.D.N.Y.) recently scolded federal prosecutors for seeking a death sentence against Kenneth McGriff.

He told prosecutors, "I feel, as an officer, as a judge, that this is an absurd prosecution based upon what I have heard. I think I have a responsibility to let authorities know. ... There's just no chance that 12 jurors will vote for the death penalty in this case, and I think it is good for us to save money, if we can do that, and judicial resources."

Judge Block was right: the government failed to convince a unanimous jury to vote for death. And he's right again in a NY Times op ed that scolds the Justice Department for its ghoulish desire to kill defendants.

Over the last few years there has been a surge in death penalty prosecutions authorized by the United States attorney general, both nationwide and in federal cases in New York. But these have resulted in disproportionately few death penalty verdicts, at enormous costs and burdens to the judicial system.

The New York Times Magazine has a feature article on the death penalty, The Needle and The Damage Done.

Lethal injection challenges are now underway in almost every state with a death penalty.

As a result of those cases, about 12 of the 38 states that have the death penalty have issued temporary bans on executions, and in one, New Jersey, a legislative commission recently recommended abolishing its death penalty altogether.

Sentencing Law and Policy reports on New Jersey's proposed plan to abolish the death penalty.

When a state commission recommended last month that New Jersey abolish the death penalty in favor of life imprisonment without parole, some lawmakers called it the latest example of going soft on crime. But a Star-Ledger analysis of trials since August 1982, when capital punishment was reinstated, shows scores of murderers would have been punished more harshly under the life-without-parole bill proposed by the Death Penalty Study Commission.

Here's what's wrong with the bill:

The Supreme Court heard oral argument yesterday in a Texas death penalty case. How predictable is this?

Although several justices, most notably Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, clearly agreed with [the petitioner], Mr. Steiker encountered stiff resistance from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. The chief justice said the Texas court had handled the case in an appropriate and even “desirable” way.

The issue was whether Texas complied with a prior ruling from the Supreme Court directing the jury to take mitigating circumstances into account in deciding between a life or death sentence.

The Justice Department is out for blood in Brooklyn's federal courthouse, where three death penalty trials are underway.

A fourth capital trial involving a triple-murder defendant has opened in Manhattan federal court as well.

"It's totally unprecedented to have two, let alone four cases going on at one time in one city," said Kevin McNally, a death penalty expert.

Even as states back away from the death penalty, federal capital prosecutions have increased. The US Attorneys who favor capital punishment find support in the Bush administration's Justice Department.

Death penalty opponents have complained that starting with President Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft, officials in Washington began rubber-stamping the pursuit of the death penalty in federal cases, particularly in states with no capital punishment laws of their own.

How about a little congressional oversight of the Justice Department's increasing reliance on death as a punishment?

Who could forget the Atlanta Courthouse shootings case in 2005 and the 26 hour manhunt for the suspect who shot and killed a judge, court reporter, sheriff's deputy and customs agent? Or Ashley Smith, the young woman and born-again Christian who talked him into surrendering and became an overnight sensation?

Jury selection begins Thursday. The trial should take six months and will be televised. Georgia is seeking the death penalty.

I have an op-ed today in the Washington Examiner asking whether the death penalty is necessary in this case and suggesting that Nichols' trial provides us with an excellent opportunity to rethink our position on the death penalty in general.

Death sentences dropped last year to the lowest number since the death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court 30 years ago.

Executions dropped to the lowest level in a decade.

"The death penalty is on the defensive," said Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington organization that looks at problems with the capital punishment system.

Death sentences fell in 2006 to 114 or fewer, according to an estimate from the group. That is down from 128 in 2005, and even lower than the 137 sentences the year after the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. It is also down sharply from the high of 317 in 1996.

A total of 53 executions were carried out in 2006, down from 60 in 2005. Executions over the past three decades peaked at 98 in 1999.

Fear of executing an innocent person, more state laws allowing life without parole as an option, decreases in violent crime and the high cost of prosecuting a death case are believed to be contributing factors.

We need one more factor to make a critical difference: moral opposition to the death penalty. We're not quite there:

A legislative commission in New Jersey has recommended that the state abolish its death penalty. The recommendation enjoys the support of Gov. John Corzine. It's also supported by experience and common sense.

With just one of its 13 members dissenting, the commission said there was “no compelling evidence” that the death penalty served a legitimate purpose and increasing evidence that it “is inconsistent with evolving standards of decency.” The panel recommended replacing capital punishment with the sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Publicity about the plague of wrongful convictions that DNA evidence has revealed provides a strong impetus for New Jersey to abandon death as a punishment. The question now is whether state legislators will follow the commission's advice. If you live in New Jersey, you can help by telling your legislator that you support abolishing the death penalty.

The other day I called Saddam Hussein's hanging "barbaric." Criminal defense lawyer David Seth expounds on hanging and barbarism over at Daily Kos. It's well worth a read.

Why did David Kaczynski become a leader of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty? Kaczynski suspected his brother Ted was the Unabomber, and he cooperated with the FBI to secure Ted's capture, fearing that if he didn't, his brother would kill again. Still, David thought the death penalty would never be imposed upon a man so mentally ill as his brother.

Ted eventually made a deal to avoid death (he's now serving a life sentence without parole), but even the possibility that the government might execute a severely mentally ill defendant was enough to turn David against the death penalty. He talked to MSNBC about the experience. The lessons he teaches deserve to be well learned.

I kind of thought once some of the investigators had said, 'We know that you're brother's mentally ill,' I thought that took the death penalty off the table. I honestly didn't realize that, you know, our system does execute the mentally ill. There's tremendous disconnect between what the law calls insanity and what medicine calls mental illness. And the end result is that sometimes we're executing people who have to be medicated to get them to the point where they're competent to be executed.

WaPo Columnist Richard Cohen names his person of the year: Gregory Thompson, a delusional death row inmate:

Thompson, 45, is delusional. He is also paranoid, schizophrenic and depressed. For these ailments, he receives daily doses of drugs and, twice a month, anti-psychotic injections. The state of Tennessee wants very much to put him to death for the horrendous 1985 murder of Brenda Blanton Lane, of which there is no doubt about his guilt.

There is grave doubt, though, about the constitutionality, not to mention the decency, of executing an insane man. Thus the 12 pills Thompson takes every day. The idea, according to a recent account of his case in the Wall Street Journal, is to make him sane enough to be put to death.